Awstats vs Google Analytics
OSE Needed Functions/Does Awstats have them/Does Google Have them
- Web traffic to any given page at opensourceecology.org and its subdomains?
As far as number of (unique) hits? Both awstats & GA have this feature.
- Display of traffic history by day, week, month, year time scale?
Yes, as well as hour & day of week. Both awstats & GA have this.
- Referring keyword that was used to land on a given page?
Yes, both GA & awstats have this.
- Which website sent a visitor to a given page?
Yes, both GA & awstats have this.
- Which link or page visitors went to from a page on our website? For example, for tracking that someone clicked on the Eventzilla registration.
No, that's not how HTTP referer headers work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer
- Support for specific aspects of AdWords that we need to track via Google Analytics?
I have no idea what this is.
Notes
Awstats is statically generated content with graphs for most of the things you requested. For example, here's the landing page for the microfactory site:
* https://awstats.opensourceecology.org:4443/awstats.microfactory.opensourceecology.org.html
Note that HTTP referer headers (when not omitted) tell a webserver where the user came _from_ when requesting content. As such, it allows awstats to record sites/pages from which a user came _from_, but we can't know where they go _to_ when they leave our site (as that request is sent not to us, but to wherever they went) -- barring some sketchy scripting
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer
I have no idea what Adwords conversions are or how that would integrate into Google Analytics or awstats.
Please consider that the "free" $ on the adwords platform may be just a way for google to get us to add their invasive scripts on our site. Once we do that, they profit from tracking our users across the web and selling the private browsing habits of our viewers to third parties. That's their business model.
